The recent fix of the Archon DR exploit show people don't actually like the fight.

[lukinu_u]

The title is a bit confusing but please read, it will make sense.
In case you didn't know, Update 32.3 fixed a bug allowing the player to insta kill Archon by reverting the damage reduction (more details on the spoiler below for those intersted).
 

Révélation

Some enemies (including Archons) use a weird "DPS based" DR, that grow stronger as your DPS is higher to ensure the fight is roughly as long no matter your DPS. However, this weird reduction could actually be reverted by dealing 0 damage (through a Riven that have -100% damage or above) which would force the DR to adapt to said damage actually INCREASE the damage instead of reducing it, which would provide ridiculously high damage number when DoT status effect and their forced 1 damage kicks in and get multiplied by millions.

Fixing a bug is a normal thing and it's all good, except Archon hunt is what made it popular and this is the part that bother me and I want to talk about.

Scarlet Spear, on April 28, 2020 introduced Condrix, the frist enemy to feature this DPS based DR and the bug have been there since that day. It's almost 3 years.
Veilbreaker, on September 7, 2022 introduced Archon Hunt, which is is about 5 months.

You can say 5 months is very long and it's just a coincidence but you can only do one Archon Hunt per week so it takes time to identify and test the exploit, so I think it's relatively short, and why was it so short ? Because people don't like Archon fight and actually needed to find a workaround.
This bug was actually usable on Condrix, Orphix, Sisters of Parvos and their hounds, but said content was well tuned and nobody felt the need to skip the boring fight, which is why almost nobody invested in negative damage Rivens until Archon Hunt release.

In short, the DR doesn't make the fight challenging but simply long and boring, to a point where people just want to skip it.
There are many possible solutions but even before talking about them because I possibly don't have the right one, I just want to mention the issue because it needs to be adressed.

Possible solutions :

• Révélation

  • Revisting the DPS based DR to be more forgiving. It would still reduce your DPS but lower it less, to make good builds matter more.
  • Remove status cap on Archons to encourage a wider variety of weapons (by allowing status weapons to make use of DoTs).
  • Make the weakness/resistance kicks AFTER the DR and boost them to encourage specific builds against each Archon, it don't provide that much diversity but at least encourage each player to have a specific build per Archon and brings some uniqueness to how you need to approach the fight, like Eidolons and Orbs.
  • Completely remove the DPS based DR and replace it by a ridiculously high DR that wears over time. This would reward players that can pull out large damage outputs by making the fight shorter, while still giving it the desired artificial length and reducing the gap between good and bad builds.

   

Edited February 25, 2023 by lukinu_u
Fixed spoilers not working properly.

[(XBOX)EternalDrk Mako]

the DR is ok to an extent, 1 shotting the beastly archons was kind of lack luster, but the combat isnt very demanding and very clunky as is

owl - blinds, summons minions, makes a barrier 

wolf- illusions, charges, summons minions

snake- stone, poison, summon minions

overall its not a super engaging battle, and is a boss floating around getting hit, or spawning a minion we have to kill x of (thats fine i guess) 

each stage makes them invulnerable , there isnt much variance or challenge when they soak up damage as do we if modded right 

this means the hunts need more variance in combat or a rethink of how the player(s) vs the archons should be , these are supposed to be hard, but obtainable to my understanding 

 

[(XBOX)elementXGHILLIE]

I don't like it because 99% of the arsenal is useless for it.

[(PSN)haphazardlynamed]

1 hour ago, lukinu_u said:

insta kill Archon by reverting the damage reduction

 

I can still "legitimately" insta kill by using a Kuva Hek and buffs to deplete the health Before DR kicks in though, right?

 

[(PSN)c1234567890alvi]

The problem is, if you don't deal damage fast enough they start spamming their mechanics. And thats the point when the battle really starts dragging. If they added health gates and connected the mechanics to those, gave them more natural bulk and maybe added some actual wipe mechanics, the bosses would be more interesting and Damage Attenuation would be unnecessary.

Unfortunately Pablo stated in the devstream after Veilbreaker's release that the more mechanic intense the bosses/content get the longer they take to create and the more resources they consume, which ends up with DE not wanting more actual mechanics in their game. 

Edited February 26, 2023 by (PSN)c1234567890alvi

[Genitive]

I'd definitely like if they eventually reworked the fights. Divide the health bar into several pieces, make it so we have to solve a mechanic between each stage, and it would work pretty well. So like the jackal fight.

The archons already have these mechanics, they just need to play a bigger role in the fight.

[cute_moth.npc]

43 minutes ago, (PSN)c1234567890alvi said:

Unfortunately Pablo stated in the devstream after Veilbreaker's release that the more mechanic intense the bosses/content get the longer they take to create and the more resources they consume, which ends up with DE not wanting more actual mechanics in their game. 

As a criticism of what Pablo is saying, if mechanics are time consuming to make then they should have made mechanics that do something other than consume time with what time they had. The Archons kept basically the same A.I. and moves that they had as a single player experience which they use in the group play Archon Hunt. What got added to the fights in terms of mechanics are primarily things like "sits underneath an invulnerable pyramid" or "summons adds and goes invuln until the adds are gone"

The mechanics they actually added while developing these fights as a multiplayer experience are all related to wasting time instead of creating an actual fight ;_;

Edited February 26, 2023 by cute_moth.npc

[lukinu_u]

il y a une heure, (PSN)haphazardlynamed a dit :

I can still "legitimately" insta kill by using a Kuva Hek and buffs to deplete the health Before DR kicks in though, right?

If there are still ways to oneshot them it's even worse, because it just reduced the already few possibilities available, making the Archon meta even less diverse.
 

il y a 20 minutes, (PSN)c1234567890alvi a dit :

Unfortunately Pablo stated in the devstream after Veilbreaker's release that the more mechanic intense the bosses/content get the longer they take to create and the more resources they consume, which ends up with DE not wanting more actual mechanics in their game. 

It honestly don't really make sense, why would you want the fight to last longer if you don't have the resources to design mechanics that makes it an interesting fight ? At this point it's better to make faster boss that you are intended to spam to get all the drops, like every other boss in the game.
Or just make it like Razorback where the boss is immortal until you do something specific and can damage it during this time window, instead of making it longer by being an adaptative bullet sponge, or I don't know, give them the damage resistance of sentient where only the adapted damage type get the DPS based DR, so you have an incentive to make a unique build for that fight and play in team.
I really feel like it's not a matter of time/resources but more of how they are spent. With a very short brainstorming, you can definitely find a bunch of interesting mechanics that reuse existing stuff and/or use very few actual resources (being code or visual), and if they don't have people who do this, it just proves it's a bad time/resources management.

 

il y a 24 minutes, Genitive a dit :

I'd definitely like if they eventually reworked the fights. Divide the health bar into several pieces, make it so we have to solve a mechanic between each stage, and it would work pretty well. So like the jackal fight.

The archons already have these mechanics, they just need to play a bigger role in the fight.

Yeah I completely agree (It join what I mentionned above so I won't details further).

 

[CephalonCarnage]

Yeah, they basically wanted it to last 10 minutes (or whatever) so changed whatever damage you did to reduce so that you'd take 10 minutes. Frankly, they might as well have just removed the health bar and made it a timer instead. Deal 1 dps, takes 10 minutes of hits. Deal 100000 dps, takes 10 minutes of hits.

Ultimately though, the problem lies with DE's damage numbers.

eg I once took my little rattleguts kitgun to SP Vay Hek, forgetting that whilst its lots of fun and kills really well, it only does that with the help of secondary merciless. Without that, vay hek was impossible to kill - I gave up as his heal phases healed more damage than I could realistically deal. Then I went back with my little sporelacer kitgun, and it took half a dozen hits to kill him. The problem DE has is with the massive variability of weapon damage that can be dealt. No amount of fiddling is ever going to change the problem of satisfying boss fights unless they deal with this (and stop busting it with ever more OP weapons afterwards).

 

To be realistlc, they need to categorise the damage you need to deal in order to decide whether a boss is a viable opponent for you, or you need to get better equipped. Or they need to make weapons deal more consistent and less extreme damage numbers. If they cannot dop this, then the combat in WF will remain broken. I think they managaed this in the past for low level players as I remember boss fights were good. The same boss fights I breeze past thinking "oh, did I kill him, whoops".

If they fix it with invulnerability phases, like the jackal, then the combat will remain broken, You'll complete whatever mechanic is needed, and then 1-shot the boss to get to the next one. Might as well just have mechanics all the way through (like Exploiter, possibly the best boss in the game, where shooting it is a fraction of the gameplay)

[(PSN)Mazarbul79]

At some point they will design a boss that is fun to play. Some day...

[Tiltskillet]

3 hours ago, lukinu_u said:

You can say 5 months is very long and it's just a coincidence but you can only do one Archon Hunt per week so it takes time to identify and test the exploit, so I think it's relatively short, and why was it so short ? Because people don't like Archon fight and actually needed to find a workaround.

I agree that damage attenuation is very unsatisfying, but not with this as evidence  Some people will exploit regardless of how good a fight is constructed or how necessary a workaround is.  I think the key difference between Condrix and Archon is that the latter happened 3 years after the former.  More time for people to figure out the exploit and spread it around, more -100% damage rivens available, more time and opportunity for DE to figure out what was going on and patch it.

I totally think DE should improve Archon fights.  I also totally expect some people to find and use any new exploits that make them easier and shorter, even if they become the funnest and most rewarding content DE has ever released.

Edited February 26, 2023 by Tiltskillet

[lukinu_u]

il y a 35 minutes, Tiltskillet a dit :

I agree that damage attenuation is very unsatisfying, but not with this as evidence  Some people will exploit regardless of how good a fight is constructed or how necessary a workaround is.  I think the key difference between Condrix and Archon is that the latter happened 3 years after the former.  More time for people to figure out the exploit and spread it around, more -100% damage rivens available, more time and opportunity for DE to figure out what was going on and patch it.

I totally think DE should improve Archon fights.  I also totally expect some people to find and use any new exploits that make them easier and shorter, even if they become the funnest and most rewarding content DE has ever released.

It's true, but people in general are still less likely to use exploits if they just have fun doing the thing, which definitely isn't a reason to not fix them, but is a good indicator of how balanced the fight is in term of interesting gameplay VS unfun bullet sponge.

A good example is the old negative critical damage bug (also related to Rivens) that I didn't mention in this post. This bug allowed certain high disposition weapons to reach very high critical multipler and I used this against Eidolons because it was fun to see other people reaction when I destroy Eidolons with a Vasto, but it wasn't game breaking and any sniper or other high burst damage weapons was a perfectly viable alternative, simply because the damage threshold was much smaller and the fight involved other fun mechanics.

In short, Eidolons just had a good game design that made the bug a fun alternative instead of a necessity to skip the boring fight.

Edited February 26, 2023 by lukinu_u

[Karsaros]

Crazy thought: if you don't like players randomly one shotting bosses simply remove their health bars and make them invincible but make it so you cannot progress to the next stage of the fight until certain conditions are met, for example: the Archon has to receive say...250 total hits from player weaponry before the it retreats to the next arena, this really isn't rocket science there are literally hundreds of ways of addressing the issue of players one shotting bosses and damage attenuation feels like the worst possible one.

[DrBorris]

On 2/25/2023 at 9:03 PM, lukinu_u said:

In short, Eidolons just had a good game design that made the bug a fun alternative instead of a necessity to skip the boring fight.

I know this isn't the main point of this topic, but I would much rather have no "good game design" than have that "good" be tied to praying to the RNG gods while you pull on a slot machine lever. Rivens as an archetypal concept I am 100% down for, I love the potential Rivens have for the game, but as they stand their effect on the game is far more toxic than beneficial and I will encourage any change that removes unique gameplay from them. #FudgeRivens

 

More on topic, Tiltskillet's remark about players optimizing the fun out of a game make this discussion a lot more complicated than people having fun goofy toys in good faith. On some level I like broken things, Warframe is as much a game of strategy where you pick the right tool for a job as it is an action game, cheese its part of its identity and it shouldn't be completely stricken from it. However, there do need to be limits. These limits are especially important when the tools are not broadly available. Again, Rivens bad.

 

I've said a lot of words on Damage Attenuation, but I won't go there (yet). While I do see value in "bullet sponge" bosses I think there is a good reason that people find Archon's annoying (when they fight them "properly").

It isn't fun to shoot something the size of a Warframe for 10 minutes. 

This is a power fantasy horde shooter, we massacre thousands of humanoid enemies in a single mission, it just feels wrong to lay so much into something so small no matter what lore BS you have to justify it. Eidolons, Orbs, or Orphix makes sense to take a couple extra shots. The entire idea of Archons being damage sponges is inherently flawed because they aren't a fun enemy to shoot at.

I know it won't happen because DE has set their mind to wanting Archons to be bullet sponges, but I do think they should really just revert them to mechanic fights with invulnerability gates. Boreal's moveset is already there, just give it like 5 gates and have hitting one trigger one of its moves. I could see Amar doing something interesting with interrupting/blocking his attacks to make him vulnerable. Nira's a bit harder, but I think there are some "quick fix" things that could be done to her kit that would allow her to fit with a health-gate style fight. 

 

There is a time and place for Damage Attenuation, I think Archons fundamentally aren't it. It will never be fun to shoot them for an extended period of time. 

Edited March 1, 2023 by DrBorris

[CoffeeElemental]

Archons need to move more imo, so they are actually hard to hit (tho it might make the fight impossible for consoles). But damage attenuation is just bs. They are almost stationary now - it's not fun, it's not "difficult". It's just boring and time-consuming in most cases.

The only time I truly had some amount of fun with archons was when my squad of randoms died in the second phase and I had to solo-carry the rest of the fight. It was against Amarr (Rhino with daggers), which is the most active of them all i think. He made me jump and fly across the entire arena. It was kinda fun. Still long af, but kinda fun.

Probably some of the first attempts were kinda fun as well, when I had no clue how to do it.

Edited March 1, 2023 by CoffeeElemental
some clarifications.

[(PSN)Sentiel]

The problem with Archons is that when they were being designed nobody bothered to ask "Is this going to be fun?" because they sure aren't, hence why people try to find exploits and other ways to get their shards as quickly and painlessly as they can.

Fighting them as Drifter was actually fun, so when the Archon Hunts were announced I was hoping to see more Drifter gameplay like we had in TNW, just with co-op.

[(PSN)jaggerwanderer]

So it's damage adaptation. Instantaneously adjusting to current damage numbers instead of average number over a set period of time. I wouldn't call it an exploit per se. More like abusing a flaw in the system. 

Wolf of Saturn Six already show DE nobody likes a damage sponge. Eidolon show us players can OHKO anything that exist in the game witht he right setup and buffs from team mates. DE is trying stuff out to find a middle ground. Personally, I prefer the bullet sponge.

[Skoomaseller]

honestly DR/attenuation aside, the bosses need to be more engaging. 

look at the jackal. ezpz boss. but the fight is actually FUN. 

[(PSN)rexis12]

Honestly the main issue with the Damage Attenuation is that they think all sources of damage is the same.

Ive said it before, but I played a Nira fight one where I use the Toxic Amprex from Deimos equiped with both the Kitgun arcane and the Theorem, and set up so that I could have the buff at highest and the DA knocked it down from the usual 10k Orange Crits to a measly 900.

Meanwhile when I brought Scourge and Knell with an immortal Chroma build, I just stood there shooting at a blue bubble for the whole mission not really moving because why would i?

The Damage Attenuation just encourages cheese as oppose to crating interesting builds and weapons.

[Danielw8]

There is not actual fight, its just BRRRRRRRR in the head for the next 8 min until he die and you get your regular shard

Exploiter orb, profit taker or eidolons are in the other side compared to this, have actual mechanics, no dmg limits, or random stuff like teleporting to random spots

I agree with everyone the boss kill its just bad

[Kaggelos]

Damage attenuation, i believe, should be more transparent, like an indicator of some sorts.

It will make you stop shooting for a bit at the Archon, focus on other objectives (mobs, summons, orbs or whatnot), and once it resets, blast the SOB in da face  \o/

[Kaggelos]

Ignore, double posted smh...

Damage attenuation, i believe, should be more transparent, like an indicator of some sorts.

It will make you stop shooting for a bit at the Archon, focus on other objectives (mobs, summons, orbs or whatnot), and once it resets, blast the SOB in da face  \o/

Edited March 2, 2023 by Kaggelos

[iPathos]

On 2023-02-26 at 11:49 AM, (XBOX)elementXGHILLIE said:

I don't like it because 99% of the arsenal is useless for it.

This tbh. Why give us so many tools when a huge portion of them are entirely useless for this purpose.

[(PSN)AbBaNdOn_]

They need to design the game around the lazy/casual gamer.   Its the people who try to maximize thier damage that then cry for harder content,  only to turn around and try to find any exploit they can to skip said challenge and insta kill stuff again.  Those people are never happy and never will be.   So stick to the casuals who just want to have fun.

Eximus are still crapping all over my fun.   Making all control/defense frames worthless or alot less of a thing,  being meaingless damage sponges.

---------------

Heres a thought.. make some content where enemies are only vulnerable to one damage type so people have to remod weapons.

[Drasiel]

The community calls "damage-based DR" Damage attenuation.

The very first occurrence of damage attenuation was actually the Hemocyte from the first time Plaguestar happened. Where snipers went from nearly one-shotting the heads to being weaker than fast firing lower damage weapons. It's what helped create the Titania meta for that fight.